It could be said that Aaron Burr, the baddest boy of early American democracy, is responsible for the famous Manhattan street grid. In a backhanded way — a way he surely would appreciate — he is.But, like a perverse Madame de Pompadour, the deluge of orderly streets came after him, entirely without his input while he was laying low in Europe.

Tom Glynn’s Reading Publics provides a richly detailed history of the development of libraries in New York City from the first -- the New York Society Library, founded in 1754 as a library for the new King’s College -- to the coalescence of the New York Public Library in 1911. In nine chapters, he examines a variety of institutions, including subscription, circulating, research, and collegiate libraries, giving a sense of the breadth of individual, corporate, and institutional sponsors who founded libraries in the city and the various purposes those libraries were to serve.

​In 1704, Sarah Kemble Knight took a journey from Boston to New Haven, traveling over 400 hundred miles on horseback, over five months, roundtrip, to conduct a little family business in place of her husband, who was indisposed at the time. In her journal, written for the entertainment of family and friends, Knight, acting as deputy husband,[1] talked about conditions on the road, the fear she experienced as a woman,[2] and the people she encountered on the periphery of Boston and New York, then one of the major cities in the colonies.

Benjamin Franklin Stevens, "Facsimile of the Unpublished British Headquarters Coloured Manuscript Map of New York and Environs 1782. Reproduced from the Original Drawing in the War Office London" (1782).

By Lindsay M. Keiter

I encountered the Morris clan purely by coincidence. It was my first visit to the South Carolina Historical Society –- (they were still in the Fireproof Building then) –- and I was disappointed to find that the collections I identified for research yielded little. An archivist suggested that, since I was looking for extensive correspondence between married couples, that I look at the Vanderhorst (pronounced VAN-dross) Family Papers. As I gingerly leafed through pages in various degrees of decay from long-ago water damage and long-dead silverfish, a surprising postal marking kept appearing: Morrisania, Harlem, New York. As my research unfolded, the Morrises continually resurfaced, a testament to the tenacity of family ties and the flexibility of “Northern” and “Southern” identities from the American Revolution through the Civil War. The Morris-Vanderhorst connections are a fascinating example of how families were knit together by marriage, affection, and property despite individuals’ personal and political identification with New York or South Carolina as the United States fractured along regional lines.

The 1790s was a decade marked by conspiracy-mongering in the United States. Polarized visions over the republic’s future inspired a prevailing mood of both revolutionary optimism for humankind and abrasive paranoia. Countering these anxieties, middle- and working-class Americans formed fraternal and literary clubs designed to foster democratic comity and candor as a public discourse. Among New York’s clubs, a new class of citizen took form, which espoused a more inclusive understanding of rights and political engagement. That allowed non-elites, like Richard Bingham Davis, to contribute to the conversation over the republic’s future.

"Tontine Coffee House” (1797) by Francis Guy. Though this coffee house was a site of frequent political clashes between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans throughout the 1790s, it also provide a sense of NYC architecture and the city's lively streets at the time of Davis and the societies’ activities.

In my last post, I promised to follow up on the career of Lewis Masquerier, the enigmatic National Reformer and Greenpoint resident whose name appeared at the top of an 1854 antislavery petition. A transplanted Kentuckian, Masquerier was an unlikely candidate to represent either the antislavery cause or the brand of utopian urbanism that would win him a fleeting recognition in the mid-1840s. But his eccentric career offers a fascinating glimpse into the many roots and diverse branches of mid-nineteenth century reform.

From the Know Nothings to Donald Trump, New York City has often been a hotspot of nativism. Back in the 1850s, the city’s nativism rose partly in reaction to waves of Irish immigrants coming in the wake of potato famine.While the Know Nothings found greater electoral success elsewhere, the roots of the officially named American Party were in New York.

By Kate Elizabeth BrownHamilton’s bustling practice exemplified a fundamental truth about marine insurance in American port cities like New York: the persistence of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars made the legalities of insurance contracts, and the extensive maritime commerce they underwrote, particularly pressing and uncertain for the young republic.

King Cotton sustained a powerful connection between the antebellum South and New York City, one that expanded and intensified the demand for slavery.[1] Gotham’s well-known cotton ties, however, have long overshadowed another cross-regional bond sealed by the city's appetite for lucrative commodities: Dixie's state lotteries.